The first Senate race I covered was in 1986 for newspapers in Florida owned by The New York Times Company.
Bob Graham, a popular two-term Democratic governor, was running to unseat Republican Senator Paula Hawkins, a conservative beneficiary of the Reagan landslide that flipped the Senate to Republicans in 1980.
Though Ms. Hawkins was the incumbent, Mr. Graham was heavily favored, and I was assigned to shadow him. He was one of those politicians who truly enjoyed campaigning, enthusiastically glad-handing voters as he and a small band of reporters flew around the state. The governor and his aides became so confident that they allowed us reporters to talk them into an unscheduled detour to Key West, ostensibly to campaign but really just to chill and have lunch.
If only the scores of campaigns I have written about since had been so accommodating. I’ve covered every congressional campaign cycle for the past four decades — interspersed with presidential elections, special elections and disputed elections — and not one of them included a stop in Key West.
While congressional campaigns have changed enormously over the years, the way The Times covers them is fundamentally the same as it was nearly four decades ago: We focus on individual races, in pursuit of broader themes and ramifications for what is happening — or going to happen — on Capitol Hill and, more generally, in national politics. We look for trends resonating through elections, such as how the debate over abortion rights is influencing congressional races around the country.
In our reporting this year on Senate campaigns, our emphasis has been on whether Democrats can sustain their razor-thin majority given a map of races that favors Republicans. Two embattled Democratic incumbents — Senators Jon Tester of Montana and Sherrod Brown of Ohio — are running for re-election in states Donald J. Trump won in 2020 and is expected to win this year. Others are on the ballot in crucial, hotly contested swing states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania.
That dynamic led to an article on how the loss of just one more seat — Democrats have basically conceded that they will lose the West Virginia seat of retiring Senator Joe Manchin III — could drastically influence what happens on Capitol Hill next year. Another piece examined how Mr. Tester’s difficulties illustrate the precipitous decline of Democratic strength on the Great Plains.
In the House, the battle for the majority has also been a dominant theme as we try to assess whether two years of extraordinary Republican dysfunction will cost them control, or whether they can hold on when some of the most critical races are far from the presidential battlegrounds in solidly blue states.
Election night has long been stressful, given the challenge of tracking dozens of House and Senate races, coupled with tight deadlines for the print editions. Back in the old days, we would try to identify key bellwethers in states where the polls closed early to give us a sense of the balloting and a story for the next day’s newspaper.
But the triumph of the internet has altered that equation, and we now have all night — and infinite space — to track results, which can be a good thing or not, given one’s interest in sleeping.
In the past, it was often fairly easy to predict which party would prevail overall, particularly earlier in my career when Democrats were on a 40-year run of holding the House. Not so today.
The House has flipped multiple times during my tenure, beginning famously with the Newt Gingrich-driven Republican takeover in 1994, followed by changes in party control in 2006, 2010, 2018 and 2022. Democrats are trying to flip the House back this year, and we will be watching to see if Congress executes a first-ever reverse double flip, with the Senate going Republican and the House Democratic.
Given the extremely tight margins in the House and the pace of vote counting in some states, we might not know for days or even weeks which party has come out on top.
This moment makes me think of another big race that took weeks to officially call. My most unexpectedly exciting election night came in 2000, when my assignment took me to Tallahassee to monitor Florida congressional races.
The usually sleepy state capital became the epicenter of the contested presidential race between Al Gore and George W. Bush. Amid rampant confusion and uncertainty over who was winning Florida, I found myself on the phone with top editors in New York in the early morning hours, discussing whether the state could be called for either candidate. It couldn’t.
Congressional campaigns used to be relatively quaint affairs with policy debates, small events and even advertising in local newspapers. Those outlets were plentiful, read closely and provided extensive coverage of the local contests.
Most candidates were also pretty accessible, considering it almost obligatory to take questions from reporters. Today’s contenders are often leery of the media and potential “gotcha” moments that can circulate widely on social media and doom a campaign. They prefer to try to shape their own narratives via friendly news outlets and the television and online ads that now constitute a majority of a candidate’s media presence. It is a big change from the past, when contenders would practically beg for coverage. Now, I have to press a little harder or maybe take an extra trip to find a candidate on the ground.
One thing remains constant in campaigns: There is always some surprise, an outcome that catches most people off guard. Speaker Tom Foley’s defeat in Washington in 1994 was certainly a shock, as was the 2014 primary loss in Virginia of Republican Representative Eric Cantor, the majority leader and a rising Republican star.
In the days after Nov. 5, we will probably again be talking about a result or two that we didn’t see coming. But after nearly 40 years on the job, I’ve learned to prepare for the unexpected and go from there.
The post Twenty Election Cycles and Counting appeared first on New York Times.